School District GM

I’ve been thinking lately as I go through the hiring/ firing/ application process about just that, the hiring/ firing/ application process for a school district.  A couple things come to mind…

1.  When you hire a teacher, if you are a well-paying, high quality district, you’re basically hiring a teacher for life.  Now, are there a few that don’t continue on for whatever reason?  Yes, but I’ve got to believe that with the way the economy is Today, the big districts are hiring the same teachers they will have in 25 years. 

2.  With that said, each district wants to save money so they are hiring teachers with say 5 or less years of experience.  Because of the way teachers are paid, by experience not performance, the young and more inexperienced are the cheaper ones to have on the books. 

So, districts are hiring the best of the cheapest teachers Today, then 25 years down the road all of these teachers are going to be getting paid a pretty nice salary, all at the same time.  There really isn’t any thought process of spacing out salaries such as one that would be used with a professional sports team.  This is kind of a scary thought for a teacher right now.  I do believe our economy is going to turn around, but still, it seems to me that districts are going to have to start subtly changing the way they pay teachers, or at some point they are going to have a ton of teachers making a ton of money, and will have no way of getting rid of them.

This is completely just a thought I have had, and I admittedly don’t know all of the science behind it, but I propose that a district hires a “GM.”  Each district should come up with a salary cap, and then it is this person’s job to keep them under the salary cap not only in the current year, but should also plan ahead.  For example, many districts now have the goal of keeping the average experience of new hires at 3 (for every person with 6 years experience you must hire one with 0).  That sounds good, but 27 years from now the district is paying all of these people the max salary.  The district GM would be responsible for not putting an exact number on the average experience, but would be responsible for advising the district when it would be wise to go ahead and hire someone with 15 years of experience, and pay them that way in order to maintain balance throughout the entire pay scale.  Big districts would benefit too because a lot of really good teachers get “stuck” in smaller districts because they would lose years of experience going elsewhere.  So, when you hire the person with 15 years experience you are only paying them for 15 more years or so, rather than 27.  Then you can hire someone with 0 years experience to replace them, and the new crop of teachers that were hired at the beginning of this ultra-confusing paragraph have 12-15 years experience and the process is spaced out better. 

I’m not saying every district has this problem right now, but with so many “experienced” teachers getting ready to retire (or so that’s the rumor) I think a thought process such as this might work.  I realize there are many more details that could have been included in this, and would have to in order to put it into operation. Who knows, they may already operate like this, but I thought I would add my 2 cents just incase anyone is looking for a GM (and it would only cost them the level of 3 years experience).

Until next time,